Alyawarra Ethnographic Archive -- About

Alyawarra Ethnographic Archive

This document contains all of my work with the Alyawarra speaking Aborigines of Central Australia conducted since the early 1970s, plus additional work with nonhuman primates and other hunter-gatherer societies that derived directly or indirectly from the Alyawarra project.

I worked for a year (1971-72) with 264 Alyawarra speaking Aborigines living in four camps at MacDonald Downs and Derry Downs Stations approximately 160 miles northeast of Alice Spring, Northern Territory, Australia. My project was shaped in large part by my interest in nonhuman primate field studies, and focused on methodological problems. Essentially it was an observational study of a small population of human hunter-gatherers that closely paralleled contemporaneous field studies of nonhuman primates.

I designed the Alyawarra project as an experiment in ethnographic reconnaissance in a society that was almost unknown prior to the beginning of my fieldwork. The task I set myself was to acquire a large body of field data that would delineate the context within which more specialized, narrowly focused or problem oriented research could be conducted later. In a sense, the objective was to do an “old fashioned ethnography,” but with important innovations, the most conspicuous of which were to collect and publish numerical data upon which the ethnography could be based, and to do so in a form that would make the data immediately accessible and intelligible to theoretical social scientists of the future.

I decided to publish my data early in the planning phase of the project. That decision followed logically - almost inevitably - from my belief that systematic, quantitative ethnographic research has a central role to play in the development of a science of human behavior, and my concern about the lack of “accountability” that continues to characterize ethnographic reporting. I view ethnographic research as an adjunct to theoretical science, so my work does not apply to anthropology as an aspect of the humanistic tradition in Western philosophy and literature.

The Alyawarra Ethnographic Archive has four major sections: Access, Pre-Fieldwork, Fieldwork and Post-Fieldwork.

Access This section contains supporting files that may assist people in using the Archive. They include access restrictions, alternate spellings, a 1979 Alyawarra bibliography, a project chronology and my c.v.

Pre-Fieldwork This section contains the research proposal that was accepted and funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal studies, plus early primatology and psychology papers pertaining to the Alyawarra project that I wrote while designing the Alyawarra project.

Fieldwork This section has five subsections that contain everything generated during the fieldwork.

Text files. 500+ pages of field journals and historical text generated during the fieldwork.

Numerical files. 78 files of numerical data (46,000+ data records with 440,000+ items of data) in the following categories: vital statistics and genealogies, censuses, digital maps, meteorology, kinship, group compositions and nonverbal behavior observations. All of them are in formats that facilitate computer assisted data analysis.

Genealogical Diagrams. Numerical data, a data key and genealogical diagrams for all members of the research population.

Graphics files. 564 files including maps, aerial photographs, portraits, prints, slides and sketches.

Audio files. 20 files containing 77 minutes of recordings of Alyawarra music.

Post-Fieldwork This section has five subsections that contain all published and unpublished documents derived directly from the Alyawarra fieldwork, and two subsections that contain work derived from, but not based on, the Alyawarra project.

The Alyawarra documents include the following:

Dissertation.

Methods. Descriptions of methods used in conducting the fieldwork and assembling the numerical datasets.

Findings. Published and unpublished papers in areas such as kinship, genealogies, marriage networks, demography, childcare and the Dreamtime. This subsection contains several papers written by others that deal with the Alyawarra data or their interpretations.

Land Rights. Papers associated with Australian Aboriginal Land Claims.

Reviews. Reviews of books related to Australian Aboriginal studies in general or to the Alyawarra speaking people in particular.

The non-Alyawarra documents include the following:

Later Primates. Two papers and a book on historical biogeography of green monkeys in the West Indies.

Uniformitarianism. Papers on gradualism and punctuated equilibria in models of human sociocultural evolution.

Group Compositions in Band Societies (GCBS) Database

The GCBS Database contains 41 sets of numerically coded genealogical censuses for band societies around the world spanning a period of two centuries. All are in formats that facilitate computer assisted data analysis. The GCBS Database contains genealogical records for 6717 living people and 2218 deceased ancestors, plus censuses of approximately 2138 discrete residential units including households, camps or villages and larger regional populations at one or more points in time. These datasets can be analyzed from many perspectives to learn just what was or was not happening within the social organization of hunter-gatherer bands when they were first studied by Western social scientists. The GCBS Database emerged directly from the Alyawarra project, and genealogical censuses from the Alyawarra project were the first datasets entered in the GCBS Database.

File Formats

Downloadable text files, numeric files and some graphics files are in Adobe Acrobat5.pdf format.

Most graphics files are in .jpg format.

Music files are in .mp3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer-3) format.

To the best of my knowledge, the Archive meets or exceeds all standards set by the National Anthropological Archive and similar organizations for the organization and preservation of anthropological records.